Bell says "I believe that the indestructible love of God is an unfolding, dynamic reality and that every single one of us is endlessly being invited to trust, accept, believe, embrace and experience it."
What, exactly, does that mean? How do we learn to trust God's love when our own understanding of a love, and our own assessment of our own value, is badly skewed by less-than-perfect childhood experience?
I've spent the last thirty years working my way through those questions.
Thirty years ago, today, I was packing boxes in our small galley kitchen, preparing to move into a century-old twin we’d bought several blocks away. We had a baby due in a week or two but were hoping we’d finish the move before the baby appeared.
Thirty years ago, today, I was packing boxes in our small galley kitchen, preparing to move into a century-old twin we’d bought several blocks away. We had a baby due in a week or two but were hoping we’d finish the move before the baby appeared.
As I finished packing one box and reached for another, it occurred to me I was in labor. An hour or two later, my husband Whitney and I were on the way to Booth Maternity Center, a midwife-run birthing center on Philadelphia’s City Line. At 2:32 that night, our first daughter was born. I was twenty-five and, ready or not, a parent.
In some ways I was well prepared for parenthood. I’d been pied piper to a tribe of smaller cousins for years. I’d helped in church nurseries and Vacation Bible Schools, I’d started babysitting the minute I’d turned twelve, I’d been a camp counselor since I was sixteen, and had launched a youth group in our West Philly church. I could change diapers with the best of them, distract fussy kids with stories, songs, silly hand motions. I was good at logistics and schedules and I could teach almost anything, from fishing, to archery, to swimming, to standing on your head.
But there was an inner deficit, a hollowness inside that sang its sad song to me in those late night sessions while I rocked and sang our fussy baby back to sleep. I could do the work of a parent, but the heart of a parent seemed to be missing. I had started from a place of depletion - and the more I gave, the emptier I grew.
My own parents disappeared a month before I turned two. They were married too young, had four kids too fast, and struggled with undiagnosed depressions and disorders in a time when no one knew how to help. My siblings and I grew up in our grandparents’ home, until my grandfather sold it and announced he was done with parenthood and with us. From there, it was a rocky road through high school, with uncertain attention from our grandmother and other adults who appeared and disappeared as they were blown along by the changing circumstances of their lives.
I had no doubt that I had been loved along the way, but I had no consistent vision of what strong, steady parental love would look like, and not enough experience of it to pass along.
I’d seen, from a distance, some imposters. I’d seen the parental love that treated the child as extension of the parents’ ego. I’d seen the kind of needy love that would give anything to earn the child’s approval. I’d seen dictatorial parents who treated their children like robots, or little wind-up toys. I’d seen neglectful, selfish love, swooping in to say “Isn’t she cute!” then turning away to other interests. I was thankful to have been spared those facsimiles of love, but not sure the task-oriented form of care I’d been given, and knew how to give, was enough.
I was reminded, often, of a line from a James Taylor song: Loving the love I love / To love is just a word I've heard when things are being said.
I loved my husband, and I knew he loved me. And I loved our childen, as two more came along. But there was always something strangely missing.
Yes, I understood that the very definition of love was Christ’s death on the cross. I’d memorized John 15, with that clear statement of love: “Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
It’s one thing, though, to understand love as a concept. That doesn’t make it a personal reality. I believed in God's love. I just didn't feel it.
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| Stampabilities Rubber Stamp |
I worked hard on all of those things: patience was almost impossible. Kindness? sometimes. Anger? That depended on the day. Record of wrongs? Still working on it.
The fact is - it was work. And that was the heart of the problem: it was all work. Rocking a baby late at night. Diapers. Laundry. Long, bored afternoons. The challenge of making dinner while kids whined underfoot. Work.
There was another passage I came across, memorized, and taped inside my cupboard door: Ephesians 3:14 to 21.
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
I understood God’s love – in concept. And I tried to live it- as a job description, a too-hard task I’d been given along with all the other too-hard tasks. But did I grasp it? Was I rooted in it? Was I filled with it? Was I strengthened by it?
I remember an evening after a too-long, too-hard day. We had three small nieces spending the week with us, to give their parents a break, and I’d made the mistake of letting the whole crew camp together in our basement playroom. We had a baby, asleep in her room upstairs, and five excited children arranged between a pull-out couch and some comforters on the floor. Upstairs it was quiet. Downstairs, it was mayhem.
I was tired, impatient, ready to be done with the day. We’d done too many trips to the bathroom, too many last drinks of water, too many “just one more” stories. Lights, and night lights, had been on and off too many times. to count. I sat on the hard wood of the basement steps, head in hands, and prayed.
I’m sure it wasn’t an eloquent prayer. More along the lines of “I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know why I put myself in this place, and God, I don’t love these kids. And I don’t feel like you love me. Show me. Show me that love that surpasses knowledge, and help me love these kids.”
No bright lights. No sudden voice. No angel song. But on those hard wood stairs, in that dark stairwell, I felt suddenly surrounded by a warmth and care that pressed in close and filled my empty heart. And I had a vision of God’s love. Not a visible vision, but a strange sense of being loved with a love that was firm, and patient, that would take as long as needed, that would hold me steady no matter what wind or waves swept past me. That wasn’t comparing me to anyone else, wasn’t grading me by some impossible standard. A warm, present, listening love, that melted my hard sad heart and still brings me to tears when I think of it.
Trying to describe it, I realize words fall short. God was giving me a glimpse of that passage from Ephesians, rooting me further in his love, and giving me power to see the immensity of his love, a love that surpasses knowledge, and, even more, surpasses words.
Something inside me changed that night. It wasn’t a “conversion” – I was already following Christ as faithfully as I knew how. It was what Paul described in Ephesians: I began to grasp the boundless love of Christ, and began to be filled, in a new way, with the boundless fullness of God.
So what was different? The best I can say is I had begun to understand, somewhere beyond my head, what that phrase, “God’s love,” really meant. I was no longer trying to earn something that I knew I could never earn. I knew, in some deep, unexplainable way, that I was loved, and that God’s love, even when I couldn’t feel it, was present, at work, surrounding me.
And I knew that my role as parent was to do my best to offer a reflection of that same kind of love: Unchangeable. Wanting their best. Not dependent on their good behavior, their compliance, their good will. I could love them when they slammed the door, and could remind them, patiently, that they were free to be angry, but not free to be rude. I could love them when they made me look bad, interfered with my plans, challenged my priorities.
And I could love myself when I fell short, which happened, and still happens, twenty times a day. I could say I was sorry, and start again. Because the bottom line, for all of us, is we’re loved already. With a love beyond imagining.
That raises some important questions: about judgment, consequences, heaven, hell, what it means to be God's church, how we treat each other, how we explain the story of God's love.
But for now, here’s what I pray, for my still-growing family, for the kids who come across my path, for the Christians who portray God in ways that make me cringe, for friends who’ve seen so little of God’s love they have trouble believing it’s real:
I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments.
Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments.
